Are you experiencing any of the following: a feeling of fullness or discomfort in the abdominal or pelvic area; feeling full quickly; gas or bloating; painful intercourse; or the need to urinate more urgently or frequently? If so, don’t overlook these symptoms. You could have ovarian cancer.

The disease is the fifth leading cause of cancer death among women; about 21,000 new cases will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year. More than 15,000 women will die of ovarian cancer, largely because the cancer grows unnoticed. It has a dismal 47% survival rate. Those early symptoms are common among women, so they’re often overlooked.

Unfortunately, only about 20% of cases will be diagnosed early, and many of those are inadvertent findings on pelvic exam or from an imaging study. And timeliness of diagnosis makes a big difference. Those with an early diagnosis have a 95% five-year survival rate. However, those who are diagnosed after the tumor has grown beyond the ovary have a 20% or lower chance of surviving five years.

Current screening techniques are inadequate. Gynecologists can take a detailed history, do a pelvic exam, and ultrasound (including abdominal, vaginal and an ultrasound technique called color flow Doppler imaging), and take blood to screen for tumor markers. When a test is abnormal, other more invasive tests, such as a biopsy of suspicious lesions or surgery, help confirm the diagnosis.

But the sensitivity of such screening techniques is low. Even an experienced clinician performing a pelvic exam can miss an ovarian mass because of the organs’ awkward position on each side of the upper end of the uterus and tense abdominal muscles.

Of the ultrasound tests, a vaginal ultrasound is more sensitive than an abdominal one. For example, abdominal ultrasounds of 100,000 women older than age 45 might detect only 40 cases of ovarian cancer, but yield 5,398 false positives. The false readings might lead to more than 160 complications from the laparoscopic surgery (surgery that inserts lighted instruments through small incisions) needed to confirm the abnormal test results.

The color flow Doppler ultrasound, coupled with vaginal ultrasound, improves the precision, helping the doctor to distinguish between benign and malignant tumors. Even then, the technique may yield false positives and the combination is expensive, time-consuming and impractical.

Currently, ovarian cancer screening is expensive because of the low prevalence of the disease, the high rate of false-positives that lead to needless surgery and the high costs of the tests and continuing follow-up.

However, a new ovarian cancer test has just been introduced that may contribute to more accurate detection of ovarian cancers. Called the OVA1, the test helps distinguish benign growths from cancerous tumors. It has been shown to correctly identify 92% of cancers when used along with radiological imaging (such as ultrasound) and standard patients work-ups. This compares to only 72% accuracy when employing usual detection methods.

The $650 blood test measures five proteins that increase or decrease in your blood if you have ovarian cancer. One of those, so-called CA125, was previously approved as a marker to detect response to cancer treatment (you want to see the CA125 levels go down and stay down). However, CA125 could not itself accurately detect the presence of ovarian cancer. But when combined with four other markers, its predictive power increases.

Unfortunately, the test doesn’t help diagnose the tumor earlier. The mass must still be conventionally detected. But it can help to get the patient to the correct specialist sooner and may save a second surgery. Right now, if a suspicious mass is detected, the patient would typically undergo general anesthesia for obtaining a biopsy of the mass. If the cancer is detected, the woman would have to undergo a second, more extensive procedure a few days later under general anesthesia to remove the mass and surrounding lymph nodes. A more certain diagnosis could help eliminate the first surgery.